Learning, awareness, and instruction: Subjective contingency awareness does matter in the colour-word contingency learning paradigm

Abstract

In three experiments, each of a set colour-unrelated distracting words was presented most often in a particular target print colour (e.g., "month" most often in red). In Experiment 1, half of the participants were told the word-colour contingencies in advance (instructed) and half were not (control). The instructed group showed a larger learning effect. This instruction effect was fully explained by increases in subjective awareness with instruction. In Experiment 2, contingency instructions were again given, but no contingencies were actually present. Although many participants claimed to be aware of these (non-existent) contingencies, they did not produce an instructed contingency effect. In Experiment 3, half of the participants were given contingency instructions that did not correspond to the correct contingencies. Participants with these false instructions learned the actual contingencies worse than controls. Collectively, our results suggest that conscious contingency knowledge might play a moderating role in the strength of implicit learning. CONTINGENCY LEARNING AND AWARENESS 3Learning, Awareness, and Instruction: Subjective Contingency Awareness Does Matter in the Colour-Word Contingency Learning ParadigmFor many years now, learning researchers have debated about whether the impact of stimulus pairings on behaviour depends on awareness of those contingencies between stimuli (e.g., Lovibond & Shanks, 2002; see Schmidt, 2012). Most often, the relation between both is examined by assessing the impact of stimulus pairings on both performance and awareness measures. Awareness can be assessed subjectively by asking participants to verbally report whether they noticed the contingencies or objectively by presenting forced-choice questions about the nature of the contingencies (see Cheesman & Merikle, 1986, for more on this distinction; see also Dienes, Altmann, Kwan, & Goode, 1995). Regardless of the type of awareness measure, the available evidence about the relation between learning and awareness is mixed. On the one hand, results from several paradigms reveal very sizeable effects of contingency awareness. For instance, in a meta-analysis reported by Hofmann, De Houwer, Perugini, Baeyens, and Crombez (2010) contingency awareness accounted for 37% of the variance in evaluative conditioning, that is, the impact of stimulus pairings on the liking of those stimuli. Indeed, there is still discussion about whether evaluative conditioning without contingency awareness is even possible (Baeyens, Eelen, & Van den Bergh, 1990;Pleyers, Corneille, Luminet, & Yzerbyt, 2007;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012b;Stahl & Unkelbach, 2009).Similar to these results, research on autonomic conditioning (i.e., the impact of stimulus pairings on autonomic reactions to those stimuli) demonstrates a large role for contingency awareness.Indeed, contingency awareness is generally considered to be a necessary precondition for autonomic conditioning (Dawson & Furedy, 1979; but see Schultz & Helmstetter, 2010).On the other hand, learning i...

Contingency Learning Tracks With Stimulus-Response Proportion

“…Interestingly, participants generally have very low levels of contingency awareness in this task (Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d, similar to other tasks (e.g., Destrebecqz & Cleeremans, 2001;Lewicki, 1985;McKelvie, 1987;Miller, 1987).…”

“…We then compared high, medium, and low contingency trials. Unsurprisingly, high contingency trials were responded to significantly suggest that contingencies are learned quickly and remain relatively stable throughout the task (Schmidt et al, 2007(Schmidt et al, , 2010Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012b, 2012d. conditions were small (<0.5%) and in the opposite direction to those predicted by the misprediction cost and bidirectional cost accounts.…”

List-level transfer effects in temporal learning: Further complications for the list-level proportion congruent effect

“…Each word was presented most often in a certain colour (e.g., "rent" most often in purple), making for high contingency items (rent purple ) and low contingency items (rent orange ). Despite a general lack of awareness of the manipulation, participants are known to respond faster and more accurately to high contingency items (Schmidt et al, 2007;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012dSchmidt, De Houwer, & Besner, 2010). Thus, high contingency trials are fast, and low contingency or non-contingency trials are slow.…”

The Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model 2.0: A single computational model of stimulus-response binding, contingency learning, power curves, and mixing costs

“…In addition to practice curves, episodic memory models have been proposed for a broad range of other performance phenomena, including contingency learning (Schmidt, Crump, Cheesman, & Besner, 2007;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012a, 2012c, 2012d, 2016aSchmidt, De Houwer, & Besner, 2010), feature binding effects (Frings, Rothermund, & Wentura, 2007;Hommel, 1998), negative priming (Rothermund, Wentura, & De Houwer, 2005), proportion congruent effects (Schmidt, 2013a(Schmidt, , 2013b, congruency sequence effects (Hommel et al, 2004;Mayr, Awh, & Laurey, 2003;Mordkoff, 2012;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011), evaluative conditioning (Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012b), task switch costs (Logan & Bundesen, 2003Logan & Schneider, 2006a, 2006bLogan, Schneider, & Bundesen, 2007;Schmidt & Liefooghe, 2016;, rhythmic responding (Kinoshita et al, 2008;Kinoshita et al, 2011;Mozer et al, 2004;Schmidt, 2013cSchmidt, , 2014Schmidt, Lemercier, et al, 2014;Schmidt & Weissman, 2016), and various other phenomena.…”